Welcome to the Year of the IPO

Will Yakowicz is a staff writer for Inc. magazine. He has reported from the West Bank and Moscow for Tablet Magazine; covered business, crime, and local politics for The Brooklyn Paper; and was the editor of Park Slope Patch. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

There's good news if a public offering is on your company's radar: So far in 2014, the IPO climate looks the best it has in years.

According to research firm Renaissance Capital's FTSE Renaissance U.S. IPO Index, the number of new public companies is up 6.4 percent in 2014 compared to this point last year, USA Today reports. Companies have raised $6.5 billion, a 22 percent increase from the same time period in 2013.

Renaissance found that 39 companies have filed for an IPO in 2014, compared with last January and February's total of 21 companies. The firm says that this means the pace of IPOs is not going to slow down.

"We're seeing an enormous backlog of companies that could come out," Kathleen Smith of Renaisance Capital tells USA Today. "We should see levels we have not seen since 2000."

But unlike the dot-com boom of that era, it isn't primarily tech companies that are going public. For the second year in a row, the health care industry is leading the charge, with a total of 14 public offerings this year, according to Renaissance Capital.

Another interesting trend this year is that the younger businesses are filing IPOs. Renaissance says that the average age for companies going public is 14 years, compared with 16 years in 2013 and 20 years in 2012.

Stocks are also hitting Wall Street with a bang from the start of trading, with average gains of 14 percent on day one.